Little Tasha
by Omnicat
Summary: Natasha is turned into a child and the Avengers don't know what to do with her. Enter Loki, who always wanted another little girl, and is the best babysitter ever. / slight AU, total crack


**Title:** Little Tasha

**Author:** Omnicat

**Unofficially Adapted From:** The Marvel Cinematic Universe, with references to Norse mythology.

**Spoilers & Desirable Foreknowledge:** All of the above, especially _Thor_ and _Iron Man 2_, though nothing specific.

**Warnings:** Loki is only ever nice to kids.

**Characters & Pairings:** Loki, Natasha Romanoff, joking reference to Loki x Natasha that can be interpreted as something serious if your goggles slant that way, Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Clint Barton, Bruce Banner, reference to Thor x Jane and Tony x Pepper.

**Summary:** Natasha is turned into a child and the Avengers don't know what to do with her. Enter Loki, who always wanted another little girl, and is the best babysitter ever. / slight AU, total crack

**II-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-I-oOo-I-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-II**

**Little Tasha**

"Russian," Tony muttered. "The bastard speaks Russian. That's cheating."

"Not Russian," Steve corrected. "Alltongue. It magically translates into whatever language the listener speaks."

"What? That's bullshit. You're making that up."

"He isn't," Bruce said. "Remember that time Thor came on TV and there was all that commotion because it was broadcast worldwide and nobody needed subtitles?"

Tony stared at him, wide-eyed. "NO."

"Wait, wasn't that right after the suit blew up on him?" Clint asked.

Bruce thought for a moment, then nodded. "Right, you were in a drug-induced coma for that. Well, now you know."

"...I don't believe you. You're all bullshitting me. How convenient is that? If he's speaking magical alien godly Alltongue, why does that sound like Russian to us and not English?"

"Apparently Alltongue speakers can control who gets to listen in," Steve said, giving him a pointed look. Even though he was whispering and peeking around the doorframe from the kitchen to the dining room just as much as the others.

"Bullshit," Tony repeated with extra emphasis, and then even more. "_Bull. Shit._ You gotta do better than that to fool me, boyscout. Alltongue, my ass."

Clint rolled his eyes. "Whatever you say. Don't look it up or anything."

"Hey, if Thor speaks this 'Alltongue' too, why isn't _he_ here to 'sit baby Tasha, huh?" Tony said.

"Because we are not calling the man back from his _honeymoon_ for something that isn't even an emergency, Tony," Steve said impatiently.

"Not an emergency _my ass!_"

"Language, Tony!" Steve snapped. "There are children present!"

"Children who _don't speak fucking English_."

Loki threw a poisonous look over his shoulder. "Hey, would you keep it down over there? Tsarina Natalia and I are trying to have a tea party."

Tony twitched.

If he'd been in a mood to acknowledge it, he would have had to admit that Loki's idea of a tea party was a little girl's dream come true. Music was playing from somewhere. The china was gild-edged and decorated with smiling flowers and butterflies in every colour of the rainbow. The silverware was made of real silver and gold. The table, covered with a snow-white and magically stain-resistant cloth, was laden with floating, rotating and bubble-blowing crystal towers full of child-sized cakes, pastries, candy, nibbles, cut fruits, mints and more, most of which Tony didn't recognize and some of which were undoubtedly Russian. Loki'd gone this far, surely importing his snacks straight from Russia wouldn't have been any _more_ trouble.

Loki wore his royal green-and-gold armour, the one that made him look less like a deranged space pirate and more like a futuristic vaguely-Viking fairytale prince, and little Tasha was decked out in what could only be an Asgardian children's dress. It was a simple black gown topped with a reddish gold upper layer that matched her bright hair and was studded with more precious stones than even Tony cared to count. A gold circlet in the same style as Loki's armour rested on her thick curls. She was seated in a high-backed, lavishly cushioned chair with an honest-to-god gauze canopy, to match the curtains obscuring the walls, and she was beaming fit to burst. Aside from the two of them, a freakishly tame (meaning, definitey brainwashed) collection of animals was gathered around the table on appropriately-sized chairs. Instead of pooping everywhere and fighting amongst each other, they politely lapped their milk, nibbled their morsels, gnawed their bones, gulped their worms (which only _looked_ like gummy), chewed their grass, and digested their child-friendly chocolate-covered mice.

The bastard had done recearch on this. Tony was sure of it.

Little Tasha had jumped up and down and clapped her hands with glee while Loki redecorated the dining room and conjured the food and menagerie from thin air, his suddenly rainbow-coloured magic much showier than usual. Tony just wished he hadn't stripped the raw materials, down to the paints on the china, from all around the house. And teleported the snacks in without paying for them, most like. Not to mention _where_ he'd gotten the critters. He was pretty sure snakes in such poisonous colours weren't native or even legal.

'Don't yell at me for wrecking your house, Tony, you'll scare precious Natalia,' Tony mouthed in silent disgust.

That Tony couldn't remember ever actually having seen his tea set before now was beside the point. The _point_ was, Loki was abusing his position as little Tasha's security blanket to make even more of a nuisance of himself than usual, and for some bizarre reason, the other guys were all ignoring this _blatantly obvious_ fact. Sure, Loki was the only one who, since they'd found her and busted her out of the quarantined laboratory, inexplicably twenty-some years younger than when they'd lost radio contact a week before, hadn't scared four-year-old Natasha shitless – be it by wearing the flag of an evil kapitalist country, walking in covered in blood, being a scary metal man who blasts in walls, or simply looking like the Hulk. Not to mention the speaking Russian thing. And yeah, okay, he was the only one who had even the slightest inkling of how to deal with young children. Especially deeply shaken, non-lethal, totally un-assassin-y _girl_ children.

"I wish Pepper were here," Tony went on. "I bet Pepper knows Russian. And even if she doesn't, she knows Girlese, which transcends language barriers everywhere."

"She would be here if you could be bothered to run your own multi-billion dollar company," Bruce said in that deceptively mild voice of his.

"I wish Coulson were here. He watches Super Nanny in his spare time. Why _isn't_ Coulson here? This is his _thing_."

"I'm sure he'll be back to tell us what made her this way soon." Clint sounded like _Tony_ was the four-year-old here, which was just not fair.

"Seriously, what good is supervising a bunch of boring scientists?" Bruce shot him a look, which he ignored. "They can supervise themselves, can't they? Why would you supervise people who supervise bacteria?"

Silence. Except for little Tasha's cheerfull Russian babbling and Loki's occasional, equally-Russian replies. He looked like he'd done this a thousand times before. It shouldn't be allowed for former wannabe-world conquerers turned grudge-bearing agents of chaos turned relatively harmless pains in the ass and occasional allies to look like loving daddies. Especially with that armour on.

"What was her name, the one who's always arguing with Fury, Maria Hill? She's a girl."

"She has better things to do, Tony," Steve sighed.

"Bruce, you have a girlfriend, right?"

"Loki is doing fine, Tony. Stop whining."

"Hey. Hey, why didn't I think of that before? JARVIS knows Russian! JARVIS knows everything! JARVIS!"

"Yes sir?"

"Translate what Loki and little Tasha are saying for me." Loki was currently cutting tiny pastries into even tinier portions. Who knew what sinister things he could be telling poor little Tasha while cutting pastries!

"Lord Loki –"

"I told you to stop calling him that."

"– is telling young Miss Natasha about a little girl named Hel, whose dress she is currently wearing. She was very beautiful, and her father loved her very much."

Just then, little Tasha screamed. Her fellow Avengers were through the doorway in a heartbeat, but Loki was one step ahead of them. He held her in his arms and spoke to her softly and urgently as her eyes darted frantically along the ceiling. Burying her face in his armour, she gave a reply, and then Loki spun around, the tell-tale blue glint of a knife flashing through the air, and –

– a fountain of sparks and a resounding _bang_. Something came falling to the floor out of nothing, mangled and smoking and oozing.

Loki touched little Tasha's shoulder, spoke some soft words. Tentatively, she looked around and allowed him to lead her to his 'kill'.

"It wasn't them," the Avengers, standing stock-still, heard him say gently in English. "It was only a ceiling imp. They're mischievous creatures from my home realm, but they mean no harm. You're perfectly safe."

She looked up at him with wide, watery eyes, wrapped her arms around his waist, buried her face in his side, and sobbed. In relief.

Some minutes later, Loki left her in the affectionate care of a tortoiseshell cat and went into the kitchen to have a word with the others. If by 'having a word', one meant 'punch the master of the house in the eye, pick him roughly up off the floor and pin him to the wall by the throat with his feet dangling inches from the ground'.

"The men who did this to her, communicated only through speakers in the ceiling," he hissed. "For days, she was a little girl, alone, locked in an unknown room where masked men performed experiments on her. And your loudmouthed AI put her right back in that nighmarish place."

"I'm sorry," Tony choked out. "I didn't know. I'm sorry."

"Make sure it won't happen again. Or I will pour an acid through every wall of this house so potent, even the bodiless JARVIS will find his death agonizing."

Tony collapsed in a heap on the kitchen floor, hacking and coughing. Loki returned to the dining room with a swirl of his green cape and took little Tasha out back to build her a swingset and make her fly.

**I-oOo-I**

"It's humiliating," Tony mumbled around his ice pack. "She makes the sign of the devil at Steve's costume but plays Tsarina with _him_, she screams bloody murder about the blood on Clint's face but cheers about the mangled little monster _he_ dumps at her feet, Hulk is scary but those fucking _horns_ of his are perfectly fine – for fuck's sake, they're sitting right there! She _asked_ him to put them on!"

"Your concern for our pride is touching, Tony, but something tells me that isn't why you're so upset," Clint said with a smirk.

"Yeah, well, at least you guys – she"

He couldn't say it. It really _was_ humiliating. He was _Tony Stark_, for fuck's sake.

"She likes me better whether a grown woman or a little girl," Loki supplied in passing. He refilled the lemonade in the tea pot – totally unneccessary, why didn't he just use magic like he'd been doing all day, the smarmy bastard – and smirked at the furious glare Tony was giving him. "That's what's hurting his pride."

And then he was gone again.

Steve gave Tony one of those patented boyscout looks. "Don't get me wrong, Loki owes you an apology for the black eye and the strangling bit, but maybe this could be an eye-opener for you to appreciate Pepper a little more and just let the other women rest."

**I-oOo-I**

The next morning, Natasha – all grown up again – came down the stairs and looked around, narrow-eyed, at her overjoyed comrades gathered in the kitchen.

Kidnappings and freaky experiments were par for the course, and debriefings Coulson's job besides; she didn't even comment on what had happened to her. Instead, she asked, "What the hell am I wearing? When I fell asleep yesterday this thing was kiddy-sized."

"Must be a courting gift from your bastard buddy Loki," Tony grumbled, shielding his hungover and bruised eyes from the glare of her bejeweled gown. "Make sure to wear it to your wedding."


End file.
